How the Independent reports an anti-semitic murder

Its headline "Jewish anger at "racist" murder by kidnap gang" manages both to suggest that only Jews are angry at the brutal kidnap, long weeks of torture and ultimate murder of the young Parisian Jew, and that the racism is only suggested.

That's despite the reports they quote from the French prosecutors that one of the suspects has confessed to Halimi having been chosen because he was "a Jew and Jews are rich".

The Independent chooses not to report the condemnation of the murder as barbaric by Nicholas Sarkozy, or the growing coverage of it as a headline story in the French press.

Instead, the report focuses on the attention the murder has received in the Israeli media, highlighting one atypical report on a radio station which

said the murder proved that it was " no longer safe" for Jewish people to live in Paris. In fact, there was a steep fall in the number of anti-Semitic attacks in France last year after a peak in 2004.

The Independent is silent about the fact that it was interviews with the family in Ha'aretz which first revealed that the police had told them that what they thought were threats uttered in the phone messages from the kidnappers were quotations from the Koran. And that the family had had it suggested that the police wanted to play down the story because of not wanting to re-ignite last year's riots. There's no reference to the investigators' view that the torture--hooding, keeping naked, cutting and burning of the victim--was based on the Abu Ghraib tortures. Or to the fact that till yesterday, the Paris prosecutor emphatically denied that there was any anti-semitic factor in the kidnap, blackmail and murder.

And the Independent manages to suggest that the French Jewish community is on the verge of being out of control:

Tempers are reaching boiling point in the French Jewish community after the torture and murder of a young Jewish man by a suburban gang calling itself " the barbarians"....

A Parisian member of parliament, Claude Goasguen, said yesterday the city could face "extremely serious intra-community violence" unless the authorities abandoned their "persistent silence on the real motives for this murder".

At the weekend, a mainly peaceful protest march by Parisian Jews was marred by a number of violent actions by radical young Jewish men. A black man was beaten up, allegedly for "smiling" at the protest. An Arab-run grocery was attacked. A motorist who was caught up in the march was assaulted and had to be rescued by demonstration marshals.

Tracts were handed out by Jewish radical groups which claimed that Ilan Halimi, a mobile telephone salesman, was a victim of "Islamo-fascism" .

Apart from that, it's good to see it reported in the UK press.

And when BBC Radio 4's Today programme early this morning ran one of its occasional summaries of what the French newspapers are saying, it reported the coverage of the Ilan Halimi murder investigation as the top item. You should be able to hear the report during today by clicking on the 6:45 link on the page I've linked.

Comments

The persistent pattern in Europe is denial. Europeans generally deny the existence of a Muslim revival revolution taking place on Europe's soil. Europeans generally deny the state sponsored Antisemitism that issues from the EU in its effort to maintain cozy relations with Arab regimes. Europeans generally deny that Muslims are attacking Jews and other to advance Muslim causes, namely, the Islamic revival revolution.

Now, for an interesting take on the reverse side of what is occuring - where Europe is a danger to Muslims -, see this article in The Boston Globe:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/02/21/testing_dutch_tolerance/

Mr. Greenway also makes good points, one about which Europeans ought to be concerned in connection with the likely backlash against the revolutionary Islamic revival movement.